Saturday Night You: The Best of Patrick Lonergan

February 16th, 2002

The Best of Patrick Lonergan

With "Saturday Night Live" on hiatus for Winter Olympics broadcasting, we at Saturday Night You didn't want to let the site (or ourselves) sit idle for three weeks. Instead, we decided to begin a series of tributes to our fan sketch writers, in an attempt to acknowledge their greatest writing achievements, as well as to learn the sick, twisted inspirations behind these sketches.

The SNL Writer's Meeting II: 5/12/01
Comments: Paul Buxton wrote the original SNL Writer's Meeting sketch, but I decided to write a sequel when there was talk of a possible writer's strike before the end of last season. It was a bit of a fantasy to have Lorne Michaels hiring us as scab writers because he'd heard about us in Entertainment Weekly! And I decided to get a little snarky about it as well, having Lorne praise me for the pre-written dialogue in the middle of the sketch. SNL fan reviewer Mark Polishuk started a campaign to have his name appear on SNL, so I threw him into the sketch to obsess over Tina Fey as he did in many of his posts on Jordan Davidson's message board. And any excuse to make former writer Adam McKay the butt of jokes seems to go over well with a majority of the viewers a majority of the time.
Apocalypse News: 4/14/01
Comments: I think everyone knows that I consider this one of my favorite sketches. I actually wrote it back in 1997 when a friend and I were joking about news teasers and how global destruction would be overhyped in reports. Of course, part of the joke lies in the fake that there couldn't possibly BE live news coverage in the event of an apocalypse! To me, that's comedy in itself, reporting on the end of the world as though it were "just another story". And I enjoyed the creative approach of incorporating each segment of a local news broadcast into the story, from home repairs to the weather. "Massive electron storm clouds" still gets me after all this time. I actually shortened this sketch and gave it a slight rewrite for SNY. It's definitely my first choice for a sketch I would love to be able to film. Sidenote: someone actually got mad at me because the puppy gets killed in the sketch. I'm not sure if she realized that this was only a script, and, even if it was filmed, the reporter character would simply be holding a stuffed toy in the scene. Not that killing a live puppy for the sake of the piece wouldn't give it more of an air of realism, but come on!
White House For Sale: 2/17/01
Comments: I started writing comedy sketches for fun during the 1992 Presidential election. In those days, my sole inspiration for Clinton jokes revolved around his being from Arkansas, with jokes about fried raccoon and holding his breath while smoking cigarettes. Then came the allegations of Gennifer Flowers, Paula Jones and Watergate, and it became clear that being able to make fun of him is reason enough to want him to be president. This was fun for a few years, but after awhile I became bored with Clinton, whose lifestyle was practically in reruns. Then, along came Monica Lewinsky and the impeachment, and I was a born-again sketchwriter! I started the SNY site after George W. Bush took office, so there was nothing left to say about my favorite political target - until the Clintons stole furniture from the White House, and I was able to take one last shot at the former First Family. My favorite parts of the sketch are the recurring "Maybe.. maybe not" lines of dialogue, and having Hillary answer the phone with "Senator Clinton's bedroom" is one of my trademark Clinton gags.
Mick Jagger Interview: 7/14/01
Comments: My fiancee and I were in the car last summer when "Harlem Shuffle" came on the radio. She was surprised to learn that The Rolling Stones released a cover of that song. "Why did they sing that?" she asked. "I don't know," I replied, "but I bet they don't like talking about it." Bam! A premise was born! That was basically it - I wanted to have Mick Jagger changing the subject during an interview where "Harlem Shuffle" is questioned, and then just keep the one-liners bouncing back and forth afterwards. Cyndi Lauper was nominated as a Mock Host the week I came up with this, so I stuck her in the sketch as the interviewer, and wrote in the line about the Stones lacking the confidence or ability to compete with her new album in the Fall.
Gary Condit Advertisement: 7/28/01
Comments: I like to poke fun at current events, so in a practical sort of way, Gary Condit is my kind of guy! I started coming up with a few more ideas for him between our Summer Mock Hosts edition and SNL's season premiere, but then came September 11th and Condit successfully disappeared from the public eye. I wrote the Gary Condit intern advertisement piece as an afterthought, feeling it was funny though lacking in its shortness. To my surprise, it was a big hit with everyone that week, even though some said identifying the blood-curdling scream as Chandra Levy was in questionable taste (of course, this is only indicated in the script, it wouldn't be indentified in an actual production). I also wrote two other Condit sketches after the advertisement, but I think this one had a bigger impact just because it was the first. I like the subtlety of Condit promising a paid one-way vacation as a job benefit.
Patriotic Tattoos: 10/13/01
Comments: Every day after September 11th brought a new focus to the Twin Towers tragedy. One of CNN's more interesting news bites told of tattoo parlors that were giving away free tattoos related to the tragedy - the numbers 9/11, Twin Towers, Amercian flag, etc. I thought it might be funny to have a con artist trying to talk his way into more than one free tattoo, or to simply have him trying to get a tattoo that's in no way related to America's patriotic surge. The challenge was to make it somewhat obscene without coming off as tasteless. What I especially liked about the sketch was having Will Ferrell trying to negotiate his way into a free tattoo - "Ferarri with a flag on the antenna" or "naked lady draped in a flag". Drew Barrymore was that week's announced host, so it was a good excuse to throw her into the sketch. The original idea was to have Barrymore go in for the free tattoo, but the tattoo artist would be unable to find a free space on her body. Someone pointed out to me that she doesn't really have that many tattoos on her body, but of course I was going for an exaggerated viewpoint.
Arnold Meets Maria: 7/28/01
Comments: When Arnold Schwartzenegger was selected as a Mock Host last summer, I thought an interesting idea would be a flashback of his first date with Maria Shriver. It also gave me a chance to employ a lot of comic foreshadowing of events the viewer is aware of years before the characters ever will be (Chappaquiddick, etc.). Some site visitors didn't know who Maria Shriver was, yet still enjoyed the idea of Schwartzenegger on a first date in America. In all honesty, I couldn't come up with a better ending than to have the two of them run off to have sex, so I was glad when that was well-received as a random moment in the sketch. I haave a tendancy to end a sketch with people making out or having sex if I can't come up with a better ending.
Alexander Graham Bell's Telephone: 5/19/01
Comments: Another older sketch of mine. Some friends liked this one enough to try performing it on video at my apartment one night, and we were never able to come up with a good enough edit. They liked the script enough for me to retool it and present it at SNY for a reaction. It has two levels of humor. 1: the ridiculous inventions we see on late night TV commercials (Leakender 2000, Oxi-Clean, etc.) 2: how far the telephone has evolved over the years. As important an invention as the telephone was and still is, I can't imagine the original model being marketable by today's standards, so I had a lot of fun with the Patent Official harrassing Graham Bell about this "worthless" invention, only to react more favorably to a Beer Can Hat. I think Christopher Walken would make a perfect, yet befuddled, Alexander Graham Bell.
Whatever You Can Spare: 01/19/02
Comments: This is one of my "Candid Camera"-style ideas, conjured up while driving around New Orleans last November and seeing all the people on the sides of the roads trying to get something for nothing. The scary thing is, if you accidentally make eye contact with any of them, they're ready to approach your vehicle. In a sick way, I thought it would be funny to fool one of them into coming over, only to ask them for directions. I imagine the results would be fatal in real life, but you can always have fun with it in a sketch! I thought it would be an amusing twist at the end to have the bums try to bargain with one another for their loose change.
Celebrity Jeopardy: 6/16/01
Comments: In recent site updates, Celebrity Jeopardy sketches have become overabundant to the point of losing their charm. I wrote this installment at a time when the Jeopardy sketches were being sent in on a weekly basis. It's also something I started to write when one of Mario Lanza's SNL Survivor challenges was for each group to write a Celebrity Jeopardy sketch. From the start, I thought Craig T. Nelson would make an adequate target, but it didn't make the cut because my team had already submitted a completed sketch before I was able to submit my ideas. Mr. T and Carrot Top were thrown in somewhat desperately, due to my having a difficult time deciding upon really stupid celebrities. The Reese Witherspoon season premiere used a category similar to "Name These Men", but ultimately I got a kick out of Nelson's affection for veal.
Baby Pictures At The Office: 4/7/01
Comments: When I conceived this sketch idea, there was talk that Steve Martin would be hosting an upcoming episode. The idea to have Steve Martin whip out his wallet and yell, "Would you like to see a picture of my penis?" was loosely derived from his old "Mind if I smoke?" "No, mind if I fart?" joke. Sean Hayes ended up hosting that episode instead, and the Steve Martin rumor soon faded. When Alec Baldwin hosted a few episodes later, I thought this idea might work just as well with him in Steve's place. The overall concept was based on my own aggravation with people who talk endlessly about their kids at work, while childless people like me are busy doing actual work. I have the same aggravation with people who insist on making a big deal about Christmas at the office, so there might be some sort of an Office Gift Exchange sketch in my future.
Bad Show Tickets: 8/11/01
Comments: I was inspired to write this sketch because a friend of mine was telling me how he thought the 1990 Quincy Jones show was the worst episode of "SNL" he'd ever seen. When I finally saw it for myself on Comedy Central, I was inclined to agree, and wondered what the audience reaction might have been after leaving the studio that night. The bit with Ana Gasteyer breaking character to explain SNL's up-down-period was just an excuse to find an ending without having to rely on a text scroll to explain the eventual outcome of Jon Stewart's character. The bad thing is that lately there have been more shows like that Quincy Jones episode than not.